[Hello71]

> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat.

subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed.

> 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™.

spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because there are so many options for servers, whereas Slack only supports one server.

> 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office.

webchat was invented for a reason

> 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, messaging, emoticon, bots, etc.

IRC has had mIRC-style colors supported and even adjustable by the majority of clients for at least 10 years. I don't know what "messaging" means. If you mean "private messaging", pretty much every chat software in the world has that. AOL and ICQ have that. You can put emoticons in your text manually if you want. It was on IRC that the concept of chat bots was invented, not on Slack.

> There is a reason why IRC, a widely-available, chat solution that has been available for decades didn't catch on. It has nothing to do with how well the software moves messages from one computer to another.

Yes, it is about how much money a for-profit company has to spend on marketing and copy as opposed to a standards organization.

[notwedtm]

This whole response reads like it was written in the 90's. Most people don't care if something takes up 10's of MB's of RAM when new PC's are shipping with 16-32GB standard.

Your comparison of what amounts to ASCII art versus Slack's rich-media embedding reads like it is straight out of a Fortran developer's "I'm still relevant" handbook. You even offer up AOL and ICQ as counter examples!

If we're going there, I guess we should simply assign everyone a GUID and be done with it, right?

HMU on ICQ: 110339943

[simoncion]

> Most people don't care if something takes up 10's of MB's of RAM when new PC's are shipping with 16-32GB standard.

ISTR a -now undoubtedly outdated- answer to a question that was very much like "Why will there not be a real Photoshop clone for mobile devices in the near future?". One of the striking things to come out of the analysis was that -absolute best case- you got something like ~300MB of RAM (and -common case- ~100MB) to work with before you got unceremoniously killed.

I would hope that now you can reliably consume ~500MB of RAM per app, but... that's still a far cry from what you can use on a "real" PC.

Unfortunately, memory usage still matters. :(

[dijit]

people will care when things consume memory when you consider that chrome takes 2G by itself, xcode/VS take on average 2-4G on-top.

everyone thinks memory is free but machines are still shipping with 8G in the mid-high end.

[JupiterMoon]

Fortran is still relevant. In it's field.

[harryh]

Up until very recently Slack had spent essentially nothing on marketing. It spread because, in the words of pg, they built something people want.

[kbenson]

How recent is "very recently"? I've been hearing ads in the podcasts I listen to for something close to a year. Prior to that, slack was only something I had seen in HN titles, and even then I had never once clicked on one.

I like slack, I think it's a great product. On finally watching their video and installing it, I immediately saw the draw, it's basically IRC with lots of usability enhancements and a lot of easy-to-configure bots available with a click or two. That said, it took me months or ads to finally take a look, but I did because the advertisements let me know that it was a possible solution for the problem I was dealing with.

It may have spread because they built a good product, but I think it's equally important that they actually exposed a lot of people to information about it. Your great product will die if nobody ever sees how great it is.

[Hello71]

alright, then replace "marketing" with "pretty pictures and rounded corners".

[tptacek]

Isn't this roughly what people used to say about Apple?

[tedunangst]

s/used to//

[harryh]

There have been plenty of very nice looking IRC clients over the years.

[lojack]

Most non-technical users don't care how much memory their chat client takes up as long as it works. They also don't care what server they need to connect to as long as they can communicate with the people they need to — less is more in this case.

Slack has its fair share of flaws but design and ease of use are not among them.